In the past few years SSD's or Solid State Drives have been slowly gaining popularity in the marketplace specifically in the enthusiast crowd. Of course with this growing market due to most SSD's being in the 2.5 inch form factor some people have a need for 2.5 inch mounting options in their case. Unfortunately most current cases don't have any, and obviously older cases don't have them. Our friends at Icy Dock recognized this problem and took their knowledge of hard drive enclosures and produced a 2.5inch to 3.5 inch adapter. The adapters official name is the MB882SP-1S, considering our past experiences with Icy Dock I am excited to see how well it will perform. Lets dive in!
Product Name: IcyDock MB882SP-1S-1B
Review Sample Provided by: Icy Dock (a special thanks to Seagate for providing two hard drives to use in testing)
Review by: Wes
Pictures by: Wes
Specifications
Item Number: White | MB882SP-1S-1 |
Item Number: Black | MB882SP-1S-1B |
External Interface | SATA |
Compatible Drive Type | 2.5" SATA I/II HDD & SSD |
Device fit | 3.5" SATA hard drive bay |
Transfer Rate | Up to 3 Gb/sec |
Support HDD Capacity | Up to 500 GB |
Material | Plastic & stainless steel |
Dimension (L x W x H) | 145 x 101 x 25mm |
Weight | 195.3g |
Packaging
The MB882SP-1S-1B was packed in a plastic clamshell. The front is fairly simple with a full view of the enclosure along with a few small pictures of the enclosures features. The back of the packaging is also very simple with a list of specifications being the only interesting thing you will find on it. Normally with Icy Dock I expect packaging that blows me away, this time around you can tell they are hoping to market this enclosure to a larger market with the simple packaging and an easy to open clamshell package.
Installation
Icy Dock's specialty is its amazing tool less enclosures, the MB882SP-1S-1B is no exception to this. Ironically I didn't have any 2.5 inch hard drives laying around so Seagate was kind enough to provide us with both a Momentus 7200.4 500Gb and a Constellation 7200rpm 500Gb. The Momentus is a standard laptop HD and the Constellation is a enterprise grade HD, the difference between the two physically is thickness. SSD's are sized similar to the Momentus but it will be interesting to see if some enclosures will fit both in the future.
Icy Dock worked their magic to make installing the MB882SP-1S-1B meaning installing the 2.5" Momentus hard drive into the enclosure was as simple as dropping it in and closing the lid, the larger Constellation did not fit though. The built in backplane plugs right into the drive as you close the lid. With everything together you are ready to install it into any case including ANY hard drive enclosure including hot swap enclosures without any issues. This impressed me so much I busted out my ol Icy Dock MB664 to see if the MB882SP-1S-1B would work. I was very surprised to find out that it fit in perfectly. Installing it in our case (Cooler Master Sniper) went just as smoothly due to the three screw holes on each side and four on the bottom just like any other 3.5" hard drive. In my case with the Sniper I didn't have to use screws, but the 10 different mounts should make it easy to set this up in any situation.
Performance
My two concerns with the MB882SP-1S-1B were cooling the hard drive and the possibility of performance derogation through the SATA backplane. In order to test this out I installed the enclosure into my computer and ran tests with HDtune , then tested the hard drive without bring in the enclosure. My results were almost exactly the same. My concern with the enclosure's cooling was not needed after examining the vents on each end. Infact even with a hard drive inside I was able to look all the way through the enclosure. Considering the low heat output of SSD's and laptop hard drives these vents will be more than enough to keep temperatures down.
Overall
Until case manufactures start including 2.5 inch drive bays Icy Dock may have found a nice nitch market. As the demand for SSD's grows this market will continue to grow. The MB882SP-1S is a good product. Simple to use without interfering with the drives performance or cooling. At just under $25 bucks there are other solutions that will be cheaper, but I doubt you will find anything easier to use.